By AUBREY COHEN, SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

Updated 7:39 am, Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Microsoft is going carbon neutral starting July 1, the company announced Tuesday.

"Microsoft has a long tradition of tackling tough challenges at a global scale. We have always focused on how our technology can enrich people's lives, build businesses, and inspire and change the world," Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner wrote in a blog post announcing the move.

Working on the issues of energy use and environmental change provides another opportunity to make a difference in the world. It's the right thing to do. And it's also an opportunity to promote positive change, as the world transitions to new ways of using energy and managing natural resources.

Robert Bernard, the company's chief environmental strategist, reported in a separate blog post that his team has "made great progress" over the past three years to reduce the company's carbon footprint.

"However, when we looked at our progress in the face of the alarming scientific data on climate change and the urgent need for society to move to cleaner, reliable and more secure energy sources, we realized that there was more that we could do," he added.

Specifically, Microsoft has committed to carbon neutrality across all direct operations, including data centers, software development labs, air travel and office buildings. It will do this through efficiency, use of renewable energy and purchase of carbon offsets. July 1 is the start of the company's 2013 fiscal year.

To "infuse carbon awareness into every part of our business," Microsoft is making business divisions responsible for the cost of offsetting their own carbon emissions through a new internal carbon fee, based on market pricing for renewable energy and carbon offsets, Turner wrote. This will create an incentive for business groups to reduce emissions.

It will not impact the prices of Microsoft products and services, the company said.

"We recognize that we are not the first company to commit to carbon neutrality, but we are hopeful that our decision will encourage other companies large and small to look at what they can do to address this important issue," Turner wrote.

We believe climate change is a serious challenge requiring a comprehensive and global response from all sectors of society. This carbon charge-back model is one way we seek to both reduce our impact and test new approaches which we hope are broadly useful for other organizations.

He noted that Microsoft also has recently:

Launched a smarter buildings pilot on its Microsoft's Redmond campus, using software to boost efficiency; this is projected to save approximately $1.5 million dollars in energy costs next fiscal year and pay for itself in 18 months;

Started working with CarbonSystems to implement a program that automatically captures environmental data from multiple sources and looks for more ways to cut the company's carbon footprint;

Published a whitepaper on where energy is used and potentially wasted in IT.

The company also noted that the Environmental Protection Agency recognized Microsoft as the third largest purchaser of green power in the U.S. earlier this month. The company says it buys more than 1.5 billion kilowatt-hours of green power a year, enough to offset 46 percent of its electricity use and the equivalent to taking more than 150,000 passenger vehicles off the road.

The company said it plans to share lessons and results with the industry and will continue to report its carbon emissions and efficiency measures in its annual Corporate Social Responsibility report and public disclosure to the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Responding in a statement Tuesday, Greenpeace Senior IT Analyst Gary Cook called the move "a good first step that shows that the company is hearing from its customers who want a clean cloud."

But the plan would let coal-powered data centers claim to be carbon neural by buying renewable energy credits, he said. "That tactic looks good on paper, but won't power Microsoft's cloud with one more electron of clean electricity."

The question now is whether Microsoft's ambition will create the transformational real-world impact we expect from the IT sector's biggest leaders. Microsoft should move quickly to back up its goal by committing to renewable energy for its growing data center fleet and using its influence to demand a shift away from dirty energy, as its peers Google and Facebook has done. Google has invested over $900 in clean energy investments and is actively pushing for stronger clean energy and climate policies. Facebook has a specific policy expressing a preference for renewable energy when it builds new data centers. If Microsoft matched or exceeded those efforts, it would catalyze a shift from dirty to clean electricity and create the scale of positive change that Microsoft could be proud of.